Deal or No Deal Island (season 2) was filmed July/August 2024 and Australia vs The World in September 2024. So he (and Parvati) pretty much did them back to back and obviously at the point that he agreed to this he hadn’t won the millions. Winning it I doubt would have changed his appetite for this though, he would care more about the title.
What will be interesting is that he and Parvati were very tight on DONDI in an alliance together until the very end (which felt much deeper than just an alliance too with the way they spoke about each other). So that will flow into this and the other cast mates won’t have seen that.
I believe the shortened season would have been the only way to get a lot of these people back. Parvati has previously said she wouldn’t do Survivor again. Janine didn’t come back for the first All Stars because she couldn’t spend that time away again. As much as I dislike it being 14 days (so it’s not really Survivor) it seems to have worked in convincing some of these iconic players to return for a much shorter stint.
Correct. Survivor has never been 3 months. The current US version is filmed for 26 days (they scaled back from 39 to 26 from season 40). I agree that to be Survivor it should be a bit longer but the average viewer won’t even notice the difference because they will probably just do a Tribal Council every day and this season will only likely be 10 episodes.